Berenice and the Constant Danger of Male Fantasy

Women are frequently told that in order to capture the attention of a man, one must follow a strict set of rules in order to be desirable. These rules wax and wane depending on historical time period and what the larger cultural zeitgeist looks like, but, frequently throughout their lives, women are treated as if their ultimate end goal is to be held in favor with men. This framework is so pervasive there are multi-billion dollar industries that exist in order to shape women into what is societally dictated as beautiful, much of society at large being shaped by men, who hold systemic power. But the truth, of course, is that men don’t just rape and kill and main women who they think are beautiful. Male attention extends far beyond who is lovely to behold, and rests somewhere in the desire for power. Men will stalk, and obsess and torture any woman no matter how commonplace or inelegant. Their attention is on women no matter who they are. In Edgar Allen Poe’s 1835 version of Berenice, the reader is a witness towards Egaeus’s obsession with his cousin Berenice. He claims to find her not worthy of his heart, but worthy of his mind, and in that way his analysis. Despite stating outright that he does not and can not love her, he still asks for her hand in marriage, promising days by her side, holding her under his fixation.

In her 1993 book The Robber Bride, Margret Atwood controversially wrote about the impossibility of escaping the male gaze: “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to a male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else.” And it is this suffocating observation that so precisely expresses the horrors of Berenice’s story. That no matter how Berenice was, the vivacious girl that Egaeus thinks is too simple, or the grotesque horror that Egaeus obsessively removes the teeth of, she is still locked in the creeping nightmare of his attention. She is subject to misogynistic belittlement and horror no matter the depths in the differences of who she is at the beginning of the story and the end.

I am using the 1835 version, because there are two extra paragraphs within it that are used to explore and witness the grotesqueness of Berenice, that do not exist in the 1845 version. She is more on display in 1835, and in that way, is trapped underneath the male gaze for more time, giving me a chance to unpack her story at Poe’s least tactful and benevolent.

The illustrations I chose for my analysis both include the reader being viewed, and Berenice herself being viewed, to illuminate my point about attention, gazing and fantasy.

More can be read about the way that Berenice is viewed in Emma Grause’s analysis of Berenice: Wasting Woman: Death and the Feminine Form in Berenice, with one of the leading questions being wether or not Poe views women as commodities or if he is simply fearful of the power that they have over him. Is it possible for women to be empowered in his eyes?

The source text is:

Edgar Allan Poe, “Berenice” 1835, Southern Literary Messenger – vol. I, no. 7, March 1835, pp. 333-336. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/bernicea.htm